Please be our guest…The 2011 Pork n Puff is set!!! Saturday September 10th we will be hosting Pete Johnson of Tatuaje Cigars for our yearly pig blowout. There is no greater celebrity in the cigar industry than Pete and we are extremely lucky to have him. This year we will be roasting 2 pigs since we are expecting a very large crowd. Both Walt and Rich will be crafting beer for the occasion, so get ready to party.

Sincerely,

Hal Rubin

More information will be out soon and I will update this as we learn of the time.

As is the tradition at the Pork n Puff, all box purchases will earn you a ticket into the drawing for a 42″ flat screen TV, an IPad 2 and my 2000 Millennium Opus X Humidor ($5,000 value). Pete is sure to bring lots of cool swag as well as some great smokes you can only get at his events.

Join us afterwards! – Following the Pork n Puff pig roasting, we will be having an after party with our new friend and partner at Amra’s downtown. For those of you who haven’t been there, you’re in for a treat. Dave Mellin is a great guy and really knows how to host a party.

Lots more details will follow (time, deals, etc) but I wanted to give you lots of advance notice so you can save the date.

This is one heck of popular cigar… and it’s not even released yet. The Tatuaje Anarchy is a special Limited Edition cigar that is a collaboration between Pete Johnson, Pepin Garcia and the Abe “Ming” Dababneh at Smoke Inns in the Palm Beach area. It features an all new blend and is one of the most interesting looking cigars I have seen in a long time.

I got the chance to smoke the new Espirit de Verite from the crazed mind of Pete Johnson creator of Tatuaje, Cabaiguan and El Triunfador cigars. This project, from what I understand, is a labor of love and something Pete has heavily invested his time in. The idea behind the Verite’s is to create a single cigar from a single vintage crop. The 2008 Vintage is available in either a Churchill (as the Verite) and as a robusto (the Espirit de Verite). All tobacco was harvested from Don Pepin’s farm in Nicaragua.

The Frank. You may have heard of it. The Frank (short for Frankenstein’s monster of course) is 1st of a hopefully long line of Monster Series cigars released by Pete Johnson of Tatuaje fame for Halloween. Thirteen evil cigars are stuffed into a blood-splattered coffin and were distributed to only 13 ghoulish retailers randomly selected from a drawing, 666 terrifying boxes total. Empire Cigars was lucky enough to be one of the thirteen stores selected to carry the Frank.

The Frank is adorned with an eerie green band that separates it from all of the other Tatuaje lines. The Frank is slightly box-pressed (very Frankenstein-y) and is long and big. Pete has revealed (at Brothers of the Leaf) that the Frank is actually a Tatuaje Taino with a Connecticut Broadleaf wrapper.

The most sought out cigar for the Halloween season has risen from it’s coffin and come to terrorize the neighborhood! The Drac, the second in the Tatuaje Monster Series, is a dangerous looking torpedo with an upside down band at the foot – which when flipped over to read the band, the cigar looks like a fang!

As I mentioned this is another limited cigar, with a few more available than last year’s Frank. There are 1300 coffin’s available of 13 cigars each. But these are really hard to find.

As I hold this cigar, I get an ominous feeling that this cigar is going to have a lot of bite!

This is a pretty popular cigar right now, it’s also pretty hard to find. This is the first of the Monster “Out-of-Costume” Series from marketing mastermind Pete Johnson of Tatuaje cigars (Havana Cellars). The “Out-of-Costume” (OOC) series concept is to take the last year’s Monster Series cigar, put it in new packaging, sans coffin-shaped box, a name it as the actor who famously played the Monster. So, since last year’s Monster was The Frank (after Frankenstein’s Monster), the first OOC will be called Boris – after Boris Karloff. The Boris cigar is slightly shorter than The Frank, and has a different wrapper. The Frank had a Connecticut Broadleaf wrapper; the Boris has an Ecuadorian Sumatra wrapper. Of course these are super-duper limited; only 1000 boxes of 10 were made.

As an aside, I’d like to point out what my local owner did with the Monster Series this year. Instead of selling boxes of Boris and Dracs to whom ever showed up first, he broke them up into little samplers, giving many more people an opportunity to try a cool limited cigar. Nice job, Hal!

So due to their limited availability, I could have squirreled it away only to peak at it and giggle with glee, but instead I just smoked it. It is a cigar after all (plus I have a few more).